


Dreamlike

by cottoncandyboys (mik0rin)



Category: Winner (Band)
Genre: Ghosts, Jinwoo only appears at the end, M/M, Taehyun-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 15:30:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7228276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mik0rin/pseuds/cottoncandyboys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taehyun plays the piano, he also can see ghosts, but that was only once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreamlike

**Author's Note:**

> written ages ago and i also forgot to post this, but anyway, here's the author's note i posted on my lj: 
> 
> I am not, by any means, highly educated in music, so these are just plain words and speculations - and probably wrong facts - that I got from listening to my grandmother playing her piano when I was little lol I don’t know why, but I had this little idea at 4am, I had watched [Yoon Hyun Sang’s music video teaser](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrHaPh_uxvA) a few hours before going to bed. I’m also very glad that I didn’t bullshit my way with this story as I always do, so this one is short compared to my usual || I don’t know anything about music in theory, if you read this and you do, I am sorry

The very first time Taehyun touched the piano keys, it was not because he wanted, but because his mother had decided that it'd be nice to have her son play the piano.

Taehyun was ok with it, if it was not the fact that the lessons bored him to death. He didn't like to repeat what he had just done, at the end of every lesson his fingers would be hurting and the most surprising thing is that he didn't even play that much - and the teacher was too strict with him, plus, he always got home with a ton of papers to study until the next time they met.

At home, his mother would urge him to practice, to be honest, she had bought a piano ages ago just because she wanted to have one in the middle of the living room (Taehyun liked to say that it was just for the aesthetic, whatever that even meant), even though nobody in the whole household knew how to play it, Taehyun was the first person to ever touch it - aside from whoever settled it there.

His mother was proud of him, even if Taehyun just kept on repeating the scale over and over again.

During that time, Taehyun was only seven years old.

After a few more lessons, his teacher would kindly lend him - but also recommend - a ton of pieces to listen to, every time he came back home from one of them, he'd have a cd with him and he'd listen to it in the stereo in the living room.

He was still at the beginning of his piano classes, only a year had passed, but he could now play short songs, those easy ones you let your children listen to when they're little, and now he started to fully appreciate classical music, thanks to his teacher.

Truth to be said, Taehyun didn’t expect much to come from playing the piano, he often saw that as something that was on his way, disabling him from doing other things he wanted and taking the time that he could be doing his homework away, but even with that, the smile on his mother’s face told him that he should just keep going with it, maybe it’d pay off someday in the future.

He kept those thoughts pushed at the back of his head, so deep that after a few more years of piano lessons, he forgot them.

The time where Taehyun started to fully enjoy playing arrived without him noticing and if he did, he didn’t care much about it, and now that he was a middle school student, the piano was something that he used as a scape from the stress he got everyday - be it homework, teachers, classmates or just a bad day in general.

Taehyun didn’t play with his mind anymore, at least he didn’t kept on replaying the sheet music inside his head over and over again to get a song right, he just...he just played.

His fingers moved as if they were in automatic and the song simply played itself according to how Taehyun wanted it to. His mother was, of course, very proud of him and so was his father.

As days passed he discovered that his favorite time to sit down in front of the tiles and play his worries away was when his mother was working extra hours at the office while his father was somewhere playing golf with his friends - yes, at the end of the afternoon/beginning of the night, his father wasn’t much of a normal guy.

It felt as if he could just do what he wanted, he didn’t need to play anything to maybe impress his mother, saying that _I’ve got this, okay, you can go back at reading your magazine and stop breathing down my neck_.

Those were rare times, his mother _and_ his father did not have the habit of going out to do different things on the same day, it was usually together and with Taehyun tagging along because they said so.

He made good use of that probably-only-once-a-month-or-even-less occasion and walked up to the piano and, as soon as he reached it, he ran his fingers on the keys without pressing them, taking a seat gently and brushing the almost dust that was starting to form on top of it - he forgot to close the fall board the previous day.

He slowly started to play one of the songs he was used to, but suddenly searched for something else inside his head and then, he remembered that he was practicing a new piece and that he had the sheets lying on his desk. He got up quickly and in less than minute he went upstairs to retrieve them from his room and came back down with the papers in hands, ready to play.

It still needed practice, he could tell by the way he ended up playing it out of rhythm, but nevertheless, he kept on trying, hopefully the next time that he was alone like that, he’d be able to play the full piece perfectly.

That night, Taehyun went to bed a few minutes before his parents were already home. While they enjoyed their late dinner, he bid them goodnight and went up to his room, satisfied about the progress he made with that song.

Taehyun really got a liking for Chopin, his teacher was more into Mozart and Schubert though, so he often learned sonatas from them, but that never stopped him from making some research himself - which led him to Chopin, Liszt, Dvorak and a lot of others that Taehyun can’t get tired of listening to.

All of his favorite pieces, symphonies and sonatas have one little thing in common, they’re usually - but not always - sad, melancholic and it’s not that Taehyun can relate to it, but it was rather the way he felt those emotions seeping through him when he listened to it, sometimes it gave him shivers. He didn’t think that the allegro ones were lacking in anything, it was just what would usually be called ‘each individual has its taste for music’.

He liked to play for himself and not for the others, he knew it was a little selfish from him, after all, he started piano to please his mother, but at this point, playing it was something he wanted to keep just for himself, as something that was only his.

The times he was alone at home were rare, very very rare, because his father had an office in their house, so he didn’t go out much, but at the same time, he didn’t really care if Taehyun was going to yell while running down the stairs or if he was going to sit down and play a sad melody on their piano, so that point made Taehyun a little happier on the fact that he was never alone at home - though, it took him a while to realize that his father did not care about the noise because he was locked with his papers inside his office, too busy with his important building documents.

Therefore with that settled, Taehyun spend even more time practicing and memorizing his favorite songs, he ended up practicing more piano by himself than with his teacher, to the point that he felt that taking those lessons were not necessary anymore - he had been taking them for more than six years and he didn’t feel like he was improving in anything because of it.

When he told that to his mother with the addition that he wanted to quit them because it was just going to be a waste of money, his mother looked sad, as if Taehyun had said that he didn’t want to play anymore and that he was going to just go up to his room and play video games, but when she allowed him to do as he wished and saw that he would still practice what he had learned, she was, again, happy and proud of her son.

Taehyun often felt as if he was still lacking, like he was the same from when he had his first lesson, he still didn’t narrow down the piece he was working on and he made the same mistakes over and over again and it started to make him, if he had to name it, depressed.

So the very first time he performed Chopin’s Nocturne in E-Flat major, op 9 No 2 - which was also his favorite - perfectly, he was enraptured, he didn’t know why, but it felt as if he had won a competition or a Nobel prize. It was, in short, self-satisfying.

And in his opinion, _that_ level of accomplishment deserved a celebration. And so, Taehyun started to play the nocturne once again.

At some point, he was so immersed that he closed his eyes, fingers in automatic and his mind somewhere else, if he felt that it was hard to play it first, now it felt like he was born knowing how to do so. While he was playing he sensed that someone was near him, but he assumed that it was probably his father. That presence never left and Taehyun was okay with it, until he felt a second and third and fourth and when he opened his eyes, startled, room silent, there wasn’t a single person in the room with him.

Not shaken, Taehyun resumed playing, completely forgetting what had just happened and with his mind set that if it happened again, he would not stop what he was doing and, instead, he would maybe try to find out what that was about.

He wasn’t sure if that really happened or if it was just an imaginary fragment of his mind playing tricks on him, but he knew it had happened, the shiver that ran down his spine when he felt that second presence _was_ real.

He played it diligently, eyes focused on his own hands, wanting to not make any mistake, but it never happened again. Not even after an hour of playing and waiting.

Taehyun gave up and went to the kitchen to get a cookie.

A week passed and Taehyun kept on playing the same song, at the same time of the day, hoping that that supernatural experience would happen again, but opposed to what he wished for, it never did.

Until he gave up, a month passed and he was still trying to figure out the events of that day., He brushed it to the back of his mind, not caring anymore, maybe it was really just his imagination.

Taehyun was again, carefree and ready to go on with his self-studying.

His warm-up was to play one of the pieces he knew by heart, which in this case would be either Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Chopin’s Nocturne that he had mastered by himself last month - of course he knew a lot more, but he gave himself little option and chose the last option because he wanted to play it.

He didn’t bother about anything anymore, Taehyun got lost in the music for a solid minute until that same feeling that he was waiting for for the past days came to him. The feeling that he was not alone in that huge living room.

He wasn’t taken aback, he knew that maybe if he forgot about it and only focused in playing, that event would repeat itself. Taehyun kept his eyes closed and didn’t stop playing, he wanted to know what was all that about, he was curious and he was not afraid, he was a brave child that was going to turn fourteen soon and he was going to prove to himself that he could go to the end, to find the source of this weird feeling without chickening out.

He fixed his attention to one point, where the first presence he felt appeared, he had his eyes closed and he sensed that if he opened them, he wouldn’t see anything and that everything would just vanish. He focused, he tried to see something, he kept on playing but the song would come to an end soon, so before that could happen, he restarted it.

With that problem solved, his attention was again on discovering what was that, his eyes were tightly shut and he started to see white. It wasn’t totally white, it looked like he had fog all over his mind - that description felt weird for Taehyun, but that was the only way he could word it.

He kept playing and tried to find a shape for the fog and, surprisingly, it worked; but it wasn’t only one figure, there were tons of them, and if Taehyun tried harder, he could take a closer look at it, after all, it was all inside his head - wasn’t it?

Until he realized that no, it wasn’t inside his head, it was just something that he could only see with his eyes closed because he _could_ feel those presences around him, walking by, looking sad, and realization hit him.

They were ghosts.

And not normal ghosts, Taehyun was sure that he saw himself there, but at the same time, it didn’t look like him. He didn’t know how he came to this conclusion, but those ghosts were not from this world, at least not from _his_ world. There is no way that he was not alive anymore, he _was_ there, he was the one playing, he was the one alive in that living room.

All of those ghosts were still walking, some left some arrived, but there was one that remained still in one place. It looked sad, all of them looked sad and anguished, but this one, the one of a boy older than Taehyun himself, managed to look even sadder.

Taehyun didn’t notice, but at some point he stopped playing and he almost forgot to breathe.

He leaned over the piano keys with his hands on his face, gulping and sighing.

The melancholic and sorrowful look in that one specific ghost caught Taehyun’s breath away and he was willing to redo everything just to be able to witness that scene again.

As years passed by, Taehyun realized that he would probably never be able to see that one ghost again - he tried and tried multiple times, all in vain -, he didn’t know why, but he felt utterly sad, just like the other ghosts floating around on that day. It was like he was missing something he never had, it made him feel empty.

It made him stop playing the piano for the rest of his middle school years.

Taehyun wanted to get into the National University of Arts when he was already in high school, so playing the piano was inevitable, this time, he didn’t play by emotion, but by technique. Nobody noticed that, he was too good at masking it - nearly ten years of playing made it easier.

Despite all of his homework and projects all of the struggle high school students suffer, he managed to go through without traumas, he really didn’t know why, but that day was imprinted in his mind and that was one of his supports to keep going - had he, by chance, fallen in love with a ghost? Something that wasn’t there and something that wouldn’t be there? Taehyun thought of himself as crazy.

When he was over high school and already preparing for his first day in university, Taehyun looked at himself in the mirror and thought that he looked like an empty shell, as if that day had taken his soul away and he was just living as a duty.

He wasn’t tired of it, he wasn’t sad that he was alive, he was just apathetic. He felt like he was waiting for something to happen, like everything that he had fulfilled wasn’t really what he was really trying to get.

Taehyun’s very first class was, as if he already knew it, a one hour piano lesson.

He walked up to the assigned class and waited for the teacher to arrive, he was early, he was always early to whatever he had to do, the class had one piano at the end of it - the room wasn’t really big -, he was sat at the stool and his back was facing the door. Taehyun kept sat, pressing the piano tiles with his fingers one by one until his distraction was interrupted by a knocking on the door.

Whoever knocked was waiting outside because he saw a shadow behind the smoked glass - it probably wasn’t the teacher too, because if he was, he wouldn’t really have knocked. Taehyun made his way to it and turned the doorknob, revealing the student that was most likely lost.

“May I help you?” Taehyun said looking at his feet and hands, brushing his hair away from his eyes with a blow of air.

“I guess I got the wrong room,” an uneasy voice replied and bowed at him. “I’m sorry.”

Before he turned to leave, Taehyun looked up to apologize for sounding so rude and indifferent, but ended up just staring. The boy stopped on his tracks to wait for what Taehyun was going to tell him, but it never came.

“I’m sorry but I have to leave, my violin lesson starts in five minutes and I still need to find the class,” he said in a rush, just now Taehyun noticed the violin case that the boy was clutching by his side. “It was nice meeting someone on the first day though? Not exactly my first day, but...” his last word trailed, rubbing the back of his neck, he extended his hand, Taehyun didn’t even notice and the boy awkwardly retreated it back to his side. “I gotta go, I’m Jinwoo, see you around.”

Jinwoo ran out of sight when he took a turn to the left and Taehyun leaned against the door frame.

The faint memory of that boy came to Taehyun’s mind and he decided that he liked a smile on that beautiful face more than the melancholic one (he also decided to look around for Jinwoo later).

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks a lot for reading!!!!!!


End file.
